by Brad Warner

I went and saw the movie Idiocracy last night. It’s written & directed by Mike Judge, the guy who made Bevis & Butthead and King of the Hill. This is a fugging amazing movie. The review I’ve linked to (click the title of this article or the word “link” below) is much better than I’m gonna be able to write. The basic plot is that the most average guy in America gets put to sleep for 500 years as part of an Army experiment. He wakes up to find that he is the smartest person in the world. It’s a great, dumb/funny movie. What’s a true shame is that the film seems to be deliberately being buried by Fox, the studio that made it. They’re almost going out of their way to ensure that no one even knows about it. The film was made 2 years ago and is only just now getting out. There is no advertising at all and it wasn’t even screened for critics. While the lack of screenings for critics is usually a sign that a film sucks, this is not the case here. In fact I’ve seen very few reviews that were not positive, even glowing. I can only assume the film’s burial must be due to pressure from the companies the film parodies. Judge must have secured their permission. But they must have been appalled at the results. Being unable to recind their permission, they instead put the screws to Fox to make sure as few people as possible saw the movie. That’s my theory anyway.

I enjoy dumb movies the way I enjoy dumb Zen. Maybe instead of Hardcore Zen, I ought to have made a book called Stupid Zen. But not Zen for Dummies (have they done one of those yet?). I studied under a teacher whose dharma name is “The Way of Stupidity” after all.

Remember Zazen tomorrow morning at the Hill Street Center in Santa Monica. Details are on the link to your right.

9 Responses

Philip Dick wrote a short story on a similar theme. A guy wakes up after hundreds of years and finds that the world is divided between a small elite and the geat masses, who are morons. The elite are trying to figure out a way to eliminate the masses and call on the newcomer to help them. He gets them to willingly kill themselves through marketing. As you can imagine, it’s a very dark story.

There’s no “Zen for Dummies” but there is the “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living” (Read this and hated it.) and “Buddhism for Dummies”.

The marketing of this movie (or lack thereof, really) has just been criminal. .. Surely Mr. Judge deserves much better than a run in Austin and just three or other major cities before DVD, where I’ll have to see it!

I was shopping at Hastings today; it’s my favorite Book/Music/Movie store. While browsing through the magazine section, “RAZORCAKE” (which I didn’t expect to be in my neck of the woods)caught my eye. I browsed through the mag to read Brad’s article. I thought it was going to be some dinky have page peice, but to my suprise the article is seven pages long. So I bought it.

I thought the article/interview was well done.

If you want a big summury – tough, go buy the damn mag youself you cheap bastards lol.(Beware— you will see some pretty umm…. interesting pics with Brad and what looks like a bronze horse.)

But I will say this, I am very glad I gave up striving for enlightment, because I sure don’t want my penis to retract.

Here is one quote I enjoyed.

Brad:

“You don’t destroy your ego. The thing that tries to destroy your ego is your ego and the process you think is its destruction is just building it up more. But you do need to see it for what it is: a convenient fiction that doesn’t really matter much in the end.”

Here is an excerpt from Gudo Nishijima’s article called “Buddhism & Action”

Gudo:

“Physiologists have found that there are in fact two opposing systems within the autonomic nervous system which control the “fight or flight” reactions in the body. One system of nerves are called the sympathetic nerves, and they are responsible for our “fight” reactions—for stimulating our metabolism andmaking us more aggressive. They make the heart beat faster. The other system is called the parasympathetic nervous system, and these nerves are responsible for our “flight” reactions—they calm us down and make us more passive. They make the heart beat more slowly. All internal organs are controlled by both groups of nerves and can thus be stimulated or calmed, or something in between.”

“What Buddhism says is that our standard or original state is the state in which these two systems ofnerves, the sympathetic nerves and the parasympathetic nerves, are balanced. In this state we are neither too aggressive, nor too passive.”

There’s “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism” which is not a bad book, actually. It’s light-hearted and informative and gives a good concise look at the major schools or sects of Buddhism, including Zen.

For the merely curious, there’s nothing wrong with this book, despite the title.